Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/February 14
This is a list of selected February 14 anniversaries that appear in the "On this day" section of the Main Page. To suggest a new item, in most cases, you can be bold and edit this page. Please read the selected anniversaries guidelines before making your edit. However, if your addition might be controversial or on a day that is or will soon be on the Main Page, please post your suggestion on the talk page instead.
Please note that the events listed on the Main Page are chosen based more on relative article quality and to maintain a mix of topics, not based solely on how important or significant their subjects are. Only four to five events are posted at a time and thus not everything that is "most important and significant" can be listed. In addition, an event is generally not posted this year if it is also the subject of the scheduled featured article, featured list or picture of the day.
To report an error when this appears on the Main Page, see Main Page errors. Please remember that this list defers to the supporting articles, so it is best to achieve consensus and make any necessary changes there first.
Images
Use only ONE image at a time
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Alexander Graham Bell -
Elisha Gray -
Karađorđe -
The Three Witnesses: Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer -
border=yes -
Rafik Hariri -
Signing of Arizona Statehood Bill -
Protests in Bahrain -
Salman Rushdie -
Live at Leeds
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Ineligible
| Blurb | Reason |
|---|---|
| 1804 – Karađorđe Petrović became the leader of the First Serbian Uprising. | refimprove sections |
| 1835 – The members of the original Quorum of the Twelve of the Latter Day Saint movement were selected by the Three Witnesses. | refimprove |
| 1876 – Inventor Alexander Graham Bell and electrical engineer Elisha Gray each filed a patent for the telephone, starting a controversy about who invented it first. | original research |
| 1879 – Chilean forces occupied the Bolivian port of Antofagasta, instigating the War of the Pacific. | featured on March 23 |
| 1912 – Arizona became the 48th and last of the contiguous United States to be admitted. | refimprove section |
| 1929 – St. Valentine's Day Massacre: Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone's gang, were murdered in Chicago. | multiple issues |
| 1949 – Asbestos miners around Asbestos, Quebec, Canada, began a labour strike that is considered one of the causes of the Quiet Revolution. | needs more footnotes |
| 1949 – The Knesset, the legislature of Israel, convened for the first time, succeeding the Assembly of Representatives that had functioned as the Jewish community's parliament during the British Mandate Era. | refimprove section |
| 1970 - The Who performed at the University Refectory, University of Leeds, later released as Live at Leeds and cited as one of the best rock live albums of all time. | refimprove section |
| 1989 – The first of at least twenty-four medium Earth orbit satellites in the satellite constellation of the Global Positioning System was launched. | refimprove sections, duplication |
| 2005 – Former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri was assassinated when explosives were detonated as his motorcade drove past a hotel in Beirut, sparking the Cedar Revolution. | Hariri: refimprove; Assassination: unreferenced section; Revolution: refimprove section |
Eligible
- 1655 – A series of coordinated Mapuche attacks took place against Spanish settlements and forts in Colonial Chile, beginning a ten-year period of warfare.
- 1779 – English explorer James Cook was killed near Kealakekua when he tried to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu, the ruling chief of the island of Hawaii.
- 1919 – The Battle of Bereza Kartuska, the first serious armed conflict of the Polish–Soviet War took place near what is now Biaroza, Belarus.
- 1924 – The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was renamed to International Business Machines, which grew into one of the world's largest companies by market capitalization.
- 1943 – World War II: General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim's 5th Panzer Army launched a concerted attack against Allied positions in Tunisia.
- 1961 – Lawrencium, the metallic radioactive synthetic element with atomic number 103, was first made at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
- 1979 – Adolph Dubs, United States Ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped by unknown agents and killed during a gun battle between Afghan police and the perpetrators.
- 1989 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa for the execution of Salman Rushdie for authoring The Satanic Verses, a novel Islamic fundamentalists considered blasphemous.
- 1991 – Upon the death of Carrie C. White, Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment became the world's oldest living person, and she went on to have the longest confirmed human life span in history, dying in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days.
- 2005 – The video-sharing web site YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees.
- 2007 – The first of several bombings in Zahedan, Iran, claimed the lives of 18 members of the Revolutionary Guards.
- 2008 – A gunman opened fire into a crowded lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, killing 5 and injuring 21.
- Born/died this day: Rǫgnvaldr Guðrøðarson (d. 1229) · John Wilkins (b. 1614) · Margaret E. Knight (b. 1838) · Anna Howard Shaw (b. 1847) · Adnan Saidi (d. 1942) · Pam McConnell (b. 1946) · James Bond (d. 1989)
Notes
- Second voyage of James Cook appears on January 17, so Cook himself should not be used in the same year
- Huilliche uprising of 1712 appears on February 10, so Mapuche uprising should not appear in the same year
- Bloody Thursday (2011) appears on February 17, so Bahraini uprising should not be used in the same year.
February 14: Valentine's Day; Fatimah's Birthday / Mother's Day in Iran (2020)
- 1779 – American Revolutionary War: A militia of Patriots decisively defeated and scattered a Loyalist militia that was on its way to British-controlled Augusta, Georgia.
- 1852 – The Hospital for Sick Children, the first hospital in England to provide in-patient beds specifically for children, was founded in London.
- 1914 – The animated film Gertie the Dinosaur was released, later greatly influencing future animators such as the Fleischer brothers and Walt Disney.
- 1990 – NASA's Voyager 1 space probe took the iconic Pale Blue Dot photograph (pictured) of Earth at a record distance of 40.5 au (6.06 billion km; 3.76 billion mi).
- 2011 – Arab Spring: A "Day of Rage" marked the beginning of the Bahraini uprising.
Valentin Friedland (b. 1490) · Eleanora Atherton (b. 1782) · Franjo Mihalić (d. 2015)